The Stand without the flu
by Jayovac
Summary: Just as the title says.


**THE STAND **

(WITHOUT THE FLU)

**BY STEPHEN KING**

(EDITED BY JAYOVAC)

JUNE 16, 1990

I called the doctor on the telephone  
Said Doctor, doctor, please,  
I got this feeling, rocking and reeling,  
Tell me, what can it be?  
Is it some new disease?

-The Sylvers

Baby, can you dig your man?  
He's a righteous man,  
Baby, can you dig your man?

-Larry Underwood

**CHAPTER 1**

Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant fourstreet burg about 110 miles from Houston. Tonight the regulars were there, sitting by the cash register, drinking beer, talking idly, watching the bugs fly into the big lighted sign.

It was Bill Hapscomb's station, so the others deferred to him even though he was a pure fool. They would have expected the same deferral if they had been gathered together in one of their own places...but they didn't have any.

Arnette was a pretty shitty place to be living in. In 1980 the town had had two industries, a sweatshop that made paper products (for 99 Cents Stores mostly) and a plant that made electronic calculators. Now the sweatshop was shut down and the calculator plant was ailing—they could make them way cheaper in Taiwan, it turned out, just like those VHS PLAYERS and transistor WALKMANS.

Norman Bruett and Thomas "Tommy" Wannamaker, who had both worked in the Steel Mill, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week because they were lazy as hell. Victor Palfrey was on welfare and smoked stinking home-rolled  
cigarettes, which were all he could afford.

"Now what I say is this," Hap told them, putting his hands on his head and leaning forward. "They just gotta say screw this inflation shit. Screw this national debt shit. We got the presses and we got the paper. We're gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation."

Palfrey, who had been employed at a chop shop until 1984 when the guys he worked with tried to get him deported, was the only one present with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap's most obvious damfool statements. Now, rolling another of his shitty-smelling cigarettes, he said: "That wouldn't get us nowhere. If they do that, it'll be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dolla, he'd put it on that here gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size. Money's just paper, you know."

"I know some people don't agree with you," Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder from his desk. "I owe these people. And they're starting to get pretty itchy about it."

Stuart Redman, who was perhaps the not loudest man in Arnette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of DR PEPPER in his hand, looking out the big service station window at Number 93. Stu knew about being poor. He had grown up poor here in town, the son of a poor dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his poor wife and two other poor children besides poor Stu.

His poor mother had gotten work at the Red Ball Truck Stop just outside of Arnette—Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if that shit hadn't burned down in 1979. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards in the neighboring town of Braintree, lying about his age to get twenty-five trillion backbreaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage. He had been poor.

Now, listening to Hap and Vic Palfrey argue on about money and the mysterious way it had of drying up, he thought about the way his hands had bleeded at first from pulling the endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that stuff from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn't been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn't asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.

Some of the non-loudness in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or the time for them. There was school, and there-was work. His youngest brother, Dev Patel, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best . . . but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed (that's kind of messed up, yo).

In elementary school he had found football, and that was something his mother had encouraged even though it cut into his work hours. "You play," she said. "If you gots yous a tickets outta here, is football, Stuart. You play. Remember that they-uh Eddie Wahfield."

Eddie Warfield was a local hero. He had come from a family EVEN POORER than Stu's own. Had covered himself with glory as quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone on to Texas A&M with an athletic  
scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers, mostly as a second-string quarterback but on several memorable occasions as the starter.

Eddie now owned a bunch of Carl's Jr's across the West and Southwest, and in Arnette he was an enduring figure of myth. In Arnette, when you said "success," you meant Eddie Warfield.

Stu was no quarterback, and he was no Eddie Warfield. But it did seem to him as he began his junior year in high school that there was at least a fighting chance for him to get a small athletic scholarship . . . and then there were workstudy programs, and the school's guidance counselor had told him about the NDEA loan program.

But then his mother had gotten sick. She had become unable to work.

It was the cancer.

Two months before he graduated from high school, she had died, leaving Stu with his brother Bryce to support. Stu had turned down the athletic scholarship and had gone to work in the calculator factory. And finally it was Bryce, three years' Stu's junior, who had made it out. He was now in Pennsylvania, a systems analyst for Dunder Mifflin. He didn't e-mail often, and the last time he had seen Bryce was at the funeral, after Stu's wife had died--died of exactly the same sort of cancer that had killed his mother. He thought that Bryce might have his own guilt to carry . . . and that Bryce might be a little ashamed of the fact that his brother had turned into just another redneck in a shitty Texas town, spending his days doing time in the calculator plant, and his nights either down at Hap's or over at the Indian Head getting wasted as piss.

The marriage had been the most beautiful time, and it had only lasted eighteen months. The womb of his young wife had borne a single dark and ignorant child. That had been four years ago. Since, he had thought of leaving Arnette, searching for something better, but small-town inertia held him, the low siren song of familiar places and familiar faces. He was well liked in Arnette, and Vic Palfrey had once paid him the ultimate compliment of calling him a "hard-ass."

As Vic and Hap moaned and complained, there was still a little dusk left in the sky, but the land was really dark. Cars didn't go by on 93 much now, which was one reason that Hap had so many unpaid bills. But there was a car coming now, Stu saw.

It was still a quarter of a mile distant, the day's last light putting a dusty shine on what little chrome was left to it. Stu's eyes were sharp, and he made it as a very old Chevrolet, maybe a '75. A Chevy, its lights on, doing no more than forty-five miles an hour, going straight down the road. No one had seen it yet but him.

"Now let's say you got a mortgage payment on this station," Vic was saying, "and let's say it's fifty dollars a month."

"It's a hell of a lot more than that."

"Well, for the sake a og-yament, let's say fifty. And let's say the Federals went ahead and printed you a whole carload of money. Well then those bank people would turn round and want a hundred and fifty. You'd be just as poorly off."

"That's right," Henry Carmichael added. Hap looked at him, irritated. He happened to know that Hank had gotten in the habit of taking Cokes out of the machine without paying the deposit, and furthermore, Hank knew he knew, and if Hank wanted to come in on any side it ought to be his.

"That ain't necessarily how it would be," Hap said weightily from the depths of his ninth-grade education. He went on to explain why.

Stu, who only understood that they were in a hell of a pinch, tuned Hap's voice down to a meaningless drone and watched the Chevy keep a steady, straight course

up the road. The way it was going Stu didn't think it was going to do anything dramatic. It stayed perfectly beside the white line and its lefthand tires spurned up some dust that had blown across the road.

Then, as if the driver had picked out the big lighted Texaco station sign as a beacon, it stopped, signaled, and drove pleasantly toward the tarmac like a car whose driver knows it needs gas. It missed the lower entrance, so it had to go back around once or twice.

The fluorescent bars over the pumps were reflecting off the Chevy's clean windshield so it was easy to see what was inside, and Stu saw the vague shape of the driver raising his hand to his mouth and yawning. The car showed no sign of going any faster from its relentless five.

"So I say with more money in circulation you'd be--"

"Better turn on your pumps, Hap," Stu said mildly.

"The pumps? What?"

Norm Bruett had turned to look out the window. "Christ on a pony," he said. Stu got out of his chair, leaned over Tommy Wannamaker and Hank Carmichael, and flicked on all eight switches at once, four with each hand. So he was the only one who didn't see the Chevy as it parked beside one of the pumps at the main island.

The motor continued to run choppily for a few seconds and then quit. The silence was so loud it was alarming.

"Holy moly," Tommy Wannamaker said breathlessly. "Will he fill up, Hap?"

"If he gonna, he already woulda," Hap said, getting up. His shoulder bumped the map case, scattering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona every whichway. Hap felt a cautious sort of jubilation. His pumps were insured, and the insurance was paid up. Mary had harped on the insurance ahead of everything.

"Guy must be on a pretty low tank," Norm said.

"Well," Tommy said, his voice high with excitement. "We best go see if he needs some help."

They hurried out of the office, Hap first and Stu bringing up the rear. Hap, Tommy, and Norm reached the car together. They could smell gas and hear the slow, clocklike tick of the Chevy's cooling engine.

"You need some help, sir?" Stu asked the man who had been driving the Chevy, now shoving one of the pump's nozzles into the car's gas tank.

"No thanks," the man said.

Stuart nodded at him and wished him a good night. The man wished Stu the same. Then Stu and the others began heading back inside.

**The End**


End file.
